Lucky forgot about his Bitcoin wallet, and then found there was 52 thousand dollars

Like the sunken gold bullion, Bitcoin wallets can also sink into the depths of the digital sea. Currently, of the 21 million BTC produced 17,76 million coins. However, not all BTC have access to: a few million lost forever. While periodically there are cases when the lost bitcoins still find their owners. That is the opposite.

One of such cases, said Ron gross. Gross — known figure in cryptosuite. Once he founded Mastercoin, one of the first altcoins. In his brief interview resource CryptoPotato gross notes the following.

Then, back in 2012, not many people were discussing the Bitcoin, and usually, these conversations were limited to BitcoinTalk forum. At some point someone proposed to pay a grant in bitcoins to someone who can implement a project to improve the scalability of the currency.

Gross liked the idea. Then he created a wallet for donations in BTC, designed for the project with the promising title Blockchain Pruning.

It was the early days of Bitcoin — even before the appearance of Electrum wallet and hardware wallet. So gross have created a Bitcoin wallet in Blockchain.info. As it turned out, donations gathered at 5,725 BTC, which at the current value of the coins is approximately 52.5 thousand dollars. Of course, in 2012, the price of BTC was quite different. And since the project has not been completed and the amount was insignificant, wallet forgot.

Who to donate 50 thousand dollars?

Ironically, the discovery of a lost wallet should thank the tax laws. Ron had to submit a Declaration about all scripttrandate that made it deep enough to dive into the wilds of its former activity. And now, seven years later, he found a forgotten purse for donations.

One of the recent reports of gross on Bitcointalk

Purses on Blockchain.info known under the category of hybrid wallets that are accessed via the Internet. Private keys are encrypted and stored on a Central server, but wallet transactions are only possible with a password. Although gross knew the password he couldn’t get access to the wallet due to changes in the system for so many years. Only after contacting the support Blockchain.info he successfully got the funds. Since then, the gross wonders what to do with the discovered treasure.

I’m willing to wait a bit. But if over the next couple of weeks don’t show someone with a concrete solution, I will donate these Dengi project, which is working on improving Bitcoin.

About 20 percent of BTC lost forever

Despite the luck of the gross, many wallets will never find their owners. According to a recent study, the total number of lost bitcoins varies from 2.78 to 3.79 million, accounting for about 15-20 percent of the number of coins in circulation. Among lost coins including the wallets of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto. They allegedly kept nearly a million BTC.

Have you ever lose access to your cryptocurrency wallets? What amount is lost due to forgotten passwords, stolen devices or banal failure of hard disk? Share the story in cryptodata of hontarov.

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